by Barbara Vine
‘Don't let your tea get cold,’ Eden said and in her accents, precisely imitated, I'm sure, I heard my grandmother Longley, whose voice I thought I had forgotten.
The snow forced us to leave. The blizzard let up but it was apparent more snow would fall and some of the lanes would then have become impassable. As Andrew said later, to be forced to spend a night at Goodney Hall would be a fate worse than death.
Vera seemed much happier since Jamie had come to her and shown her affection. I thought, and I believe Helen and Andrew did too, that this was the only trouble. She had been upset by his indifference. You could see, too, that he did have a cold. His nose was running and occasionally he made croupy sounds. The nursery was very hot and no doubt it wouldn't have been wise to take him out into the cold for even ten seconds. I think we all felt much better about the arrangement by the time we went downstairs and collected the General. Jamie had kissed Vera goodbye, had seemed quite cheerful in the nanny's arms, waving to us from the nursery door. And Eden also kissed Vera. Indeed she kissed us all and, shivering at the snow, begged us to phone her the moment we got to Walbrooks just to let her know we had got there.
That was the only weekend I spent away from Cambridge that term. I wasn't sufficiently interested or concerned to inquire what happened on the following Saturday. If I thought about it at all, I assumed Jamie was back with Vera at Laurel Cottage. I remember I did wonder how Vera would get on with a ‘big dog’, no pet animal ever having been kept by any Longley within memory of the oldest of them.
It was April before I learned that Jamie had never been returned to Vera but was still living at Goodney Hall, apparently with her acquiescence.
Daniel Stewart is a man who looks very young at first. One's first impression is how young he is, a mere boy. This is because he is thin and straight-backed and wears his hair long and hasn't gone bald. Helen has a theory that for the best effect, women – and men, too, for all I know – should dress ten years younger than they are, neither more nor less. Stewart dresses twenty years younger than he is, and it is too much, it is verging on the absurd. After a time one becomes insistently conscious of the lines on his face, so painful when he smiles, and the grey in his hair that the colour rinse has not dyed so deeply as the rest of it – copper threads, in fact, among the brown.
But all this is by the way. He is pleasant, a little ingratiating, intelligent. He sits in my drawing-room with a whole heap of books on fungi spread around him and we wait for Helen to come. He, of course, has met her before. I am listening to him with half an ear and with the other half for the diesel throb of the taxi that will bring her.
‘I want to get this straight,’ he says. ‘Was the poison Vera Hillyard used the same as that which killed the old woman she found dead in the cottage?’
‘Mrs Hislop,’ I tell him. ‘You're asking me? I didn't even know it was poison that killed her. I knew she used to cook fungi for herself–what I'd call toadstools.’
‘The inquest verdict was “natural causes”. The death certificate said myocardial infarction, which is a sort of heart attack. In other words, she died of heart failure, which is what we all die of. At the post-mortem, considerable kidney deterioration was found but no comment was made on this. Mrs Hislop was, after all, nearly eighty. In the cottage was a basket of uncooked fungi and in a saucepan a kind of stew of fungi. Both were analysed and found to be harmless.’
I ask him if the post-mortem found any poisonous fungi in Mrs Hislop's body. I thought I wasn't interested in this kind of thing – for instance, I never read detective stories – but as we talk about it, I find I am.
‘There was nothing, hence the verdict. But there was a great deal of talk about poisonous fungi at the inquest, largely, I think, because Mrs Hislop was known for dabbling with them. Vera Hillyard gave evidence at that inquest, of course, but you knew that.’
‘No, I didn't,’ I say and I am very surprised. This is because I remember Vera telling me how she found Mrs Hislop but not telling me she was at the inquest. Yet this surely must have made a profound and lasting impression on her, sheltered fourteen-year-old that she was. The implications of her failure to tell me are not lost on me. At that inquest she would have heard all the talk about fungi. She would have stored it up to turn over later in her mind.
‘In spite of that verdict,’ he says, ‘I am sure Mrs Hislop did die of fungal poisoning and that the poison she used was the same that Vera Hillyard used nearly thirty years later. Nobody really knows what it was and nobody ever will know now. It's possible only to take the symptoms and calculate from that, to use, in fact, what we do know and make an intelligent guess from that.’
‘Like the Emperor Hadrian's ears,’ I say.
He doesn't take me up on that one. ‘I'm wondering if it was a poison called orellanin that's responsible. It's found in the cortinarius species of fungi. For a long time, cortinarius was considered harmless and it wasn't until 1962 that the properties of Cortinarius orellanus were discovered by a Pole called Grzymala. It damages the kidneys. Death has been caused in children after several days, in adults after weeks or months. The kidneys go wrong.’
‘Mrs Hislop was in the habit of regularly eating strange fungus,’ I say. ‘You say that the post-mortem found kidney damage. Vera told me that when she found her, she looked “all swollen up”. It could have happened months after she'd eaten what-do-you-call-it, orellanus.’ I pick up his field guide to mushrooms and other fungi, read the relevant section and immediately see objections.
‘Yes, but look here, it says that orellanus is rare or absent in Great Britain. Vera didn't go to Poland collecting fungi. And the other one, turmalis, that's rare or absent here, too.’
‘I know,’ Stewart says, ‘I haven't missed that. But what about the purple agaric that isn't even in this book? Here it is.’ He hands me a thin, flat booklet published by the then Ministry of Agriculture and Fisheries, some ten years before Vera began on her poisoning course. ‘Cortinarius purpurascens,’ he says. ‘Apparently it's fairly common. It says it has been listed as edible but the word is merely used in the sense that it has been eaten without ill effects.’
This book, a copy of it I mean, I have seen before. Although I know Vera was a murderess, although I know that before she used the knife she tried poison, nevertheless, I have that curious sensation we call the heart turning over. The book (called Bulletin No. 23, Edible and Poisonous Fungi) is flat and dark green with a picture on its cover of a golden chantarelle such as one sees for sale in French markets. The date of publication was 1940, the price half a crown. In the little text beside the watercolour drawing of the purple agaric, a note explains that the species is difficult of determination even by experts and warns that experiments are not advisable. Nothing about orellanin, though, and just as I am beginning to say this to Stewart, I remember what he has told me, that its properties weren't discovered until twenty-two years after Bulletin No. 23 was published.
‘It belongs to the cortinarius species,’ he tells me, ‘and therefore very probably contains the kidney-damaging orellanus.’
I gaze at the picture and remember with perfect clarity seeing purple mushrooms in the woods at Sindon. It was always late summer that I was there, wasn't it? For a long time it was only in the late summer or early autumn. Anne and I would wander through the woods together. It was near the wash where the river was forded and a wooden bridge passed over it, there where Vera once sat gossiping with her school friend and Kathleen March was snatched from her pram, there it was that I had seen cortinarius, growing in clusters through the leaf mould, date-brown olivaceous (as the book puts it), glutinous and opaque, expanded and marked with a raised, violet fuscous zone, the stem fibrillose, pallid, the gills bluish, then cinnamon, violaceous when bruised, broad and crowded, the flesh azure blue.
At this point, Helen comes in and how glad of it I am! The nausea of old remembered ugly things is in my throat. She embraces me, shakes hands with Stewart.
‘I have brought my
Valium with me, Mr Stewart, so if you want to talk about you-know-what, could you give me warning, and I can take one in good time.’
Stewart asks her only to describe Goodney Hall to him. The people now living there won't permit him to see over it. That won't upset her, will it? She shakes her head. The wide-brimmed hat she is wearing is the rich brownish-violet of the purple agaric, incurved lilac fuscous, and I am glad when she takes it off and bares her small, white, fluffy head.
‘I won't take my Valium but perhaps we could have our sherry a wee bit early, darling?’
In wilder moments I have sometimes thought I married in order to have Helen for my mother-in-law. Or was that not the cause but merely the one good effect? Surely I married as I did because I was afraid, young, ignorant and inexperienced as I was, that if I didn't marry within the family, no one outside the family would have me. No one outside would marry a hanged woman's niece.
Helen can remember thirty-five years back better than I can. I remembered Eden's drawing-room as pink and green, the whole house pink and green, but Helen remembers crimsons and yellows. She remembers the Arthur Rackham paper on the nursery walls changed for a plain deep blue that made the room look cold even in summer or even when a fire was burning in the grate. And she remembers Jamie's nanny's name: June Poole. I am amazed at myself for forgetting it, for was not Grace Poole the nurse and keeper of Mr Rochester's wife? The situations were very different, of course. Jamie wasn't deranged or female or a secret, though for a while he was a prisoner, and there was no part in this drama for a Jane Eyre.
June Poole was a girl from the village, from Goodney Parva, and her qualification, not a bad one perhaps, for being Jamie's nanny was that she was the oldest of seven siblings. She had known no other life than that of minding children. Whether she liked it was another matter. Did she even like Jamie? Helen, though, doesn't speak of this. I know she finds speaking of Jamie at four and five intensely painful. I have given her her sherry and she is talking of the rhododendron garden at Goodney Hall, famous all over the county and opened by Eden to the public that spring, when my husband comes in.
I love the way they are so pleased to see each other, he and Helen, and kiss and are at ease as if it were the most natural thing in the world. Yet I have never quite got used to it. I don't think he likes Stewart and certainly he dislikes the idea of Stewart's book.
‘I hope you're keeping the law of libel in the forefront of your mind, Mr Stewart,’ he says, winking at me behind the old young man's back.
Illness governed events at this time. First Vera was ill, then Jamie, lastly Eden. What Jamie's illness really was I never knew. Croup perhaps, though he was old for that, bronchitis, pleurisy, I don't know. This illness, though, was the reason given for his not going home to Sindon. Vera's letter to my father, dated 30 March 1949, survives.
‘… Eden has kindly invited me to stay with them at Goodney Hall for a couple of weeks. Tony is sending one of the cars for me tomorrow…’
Poor Vera! Even in the extremity of her dread, snobbery – in this case vicarious snobbery – was not forgotten.
‘Jamie has been there for nearly three months now, unfit to be moved since the bad cold with complications he had in the middle of February. I miss him dreadfully as you can imagine but have had to accept what I know to be best for him. Certainly there was no question of moving him, taking him out, etc., during the very cold weather. Eden has been kindness itself, though I know you will agree that any other behaviour from her would have surprised us. She has lavished every care on him and daily kept me up to the minute with regard to his progress. It will be nice to spend time under the same roof with him. We shall really have to get acquainted all over again! By the time the two weeks are at an end, he should be fit enough to accompany me back to Laurel Cottage…’
These lines are a masterpiece of their kind for concealing true facts and real feelings. They are also perhaps a sop to Providence or a placating of the Furies. If I put a brave face on things, if I make believe all is well, all will be well. Yet I, Faith, know so little and there is no one alive who knows more. For instance, had Vera and Eden by this time discussed the question of Jamie's future? Of Jamie's past, come to that? Had Eden made to Vera any actual declaration of intent? Or was poor Vera – and this I think to be most likely – left for all those months in suspense, knowing no more of this aspect of things than she had expressed to us that snowy day in February, no more than she told my father in the letter, but terribly afraid of the worst?
I think, in the light of Chad Hamner's statement and my own memories, that she had been aware she had something to fear from Eden's wedding day onwards, perhaps from earlier than that, the announcement of her engagement. Her fears became concrete, real, not chimeras, when Eden miscarried.
Often, since then, I have wondered what the two sisters said to each other when they were alone together during those two weeks of April. Tony went to London, by train from Colchester, at least three times a week. No doubt Eden's friends came sometimes, Mrs King would have been in and out and June Poole too. When they walked or were in the garden and at meals, too, Jamie would have been with them. But what of the long hours when they were alone, just the two of them?
Did they thrash things out, trying to find a compromise, trying to create a sharing future, a communal life? Or was Eden adamant and Vera pleading? Was the identity of Jamie's father ever discussed? Knowing them, these two sisters, I tend to believe that they were never open about any of it. They never said what they felt or meant to do but always spoke in half-shades and half-truths, Eden still keeping up the pretence that Jamie was ‘delicate’, ‘not strong’, Vera terrified of antagonizing her.
Did they reminisce about the past? That surely would have been too painful. Not for them, at that time, to look back into the distant past when Vera had saved the infant Eden's life, had rejected her own son to be a mother to her, had wept bitterly when the war took Eden away, those days when they had loved each other dearly – in the far.
That summer, for part of the Long Vacation, I went with Andrew to Walbrooks. Of course I married him. Not then, not for another year and more and our Finals were done with and he had taken his First and I my disappointing Lower Second. Then, we were not even engaged. For a few months I was in love with him, but being no Desdemona, I could not love him for the dangers he had passed. The dangers he had passed began to bore me to death and I dreaded ever hearing the words Battle of Britain again. If Vera had not been hanged for murder I would have dropped Helen's son as gracefully as I could and hoped we might have become no more than cousins again.
But this is Vera's story, not mine. What was I then, or at any time, but a figure in one of Vera's dreams? A potential ally against Eden? What was anyone to her but that?
She had passed the greater part of that summer staying at Goodney Hall, sometimes going home to Laurel Cottage for a week or a few days, but Jamie had never gone with her. Now he was five, he had become five in May, and the question had come up of his going to school. Naturally, it was taken for granted he would go to Sindon village school and probably remain there till he was eleven. Vera would not do with Jamie what had been done with Francis. Her beloved Jamie wouldn't be separated from her and sent away to prep school. Nor, we all thought, would Gerald be likely to intervene. It would be Vera's decision and Vera's only. I don't think any of us any longer believed – though we never spoke of it among ourselves – that Gerald was Jamie's father. Jamie had to have had a father and it wasn't Chad, so Vera had to have had another lover. My own view at the time, which I never expressed even to Andrew, was that some former boyfriend of Vera's, someone she had known before she knew Gerald, had come home on leave and they had met by chance, and frustration and nostalgia and perhaps an under-the-counter bottle of wine had done the rest. It didn't sound like Vera but people's sex lives seldom do sound like the people who have them.
Vera asked Andrew and me to help her kidnap Jamie.
We had been to Bury St E
dmunds in the old Mercedes, just the two of us, and driving back went over the Stour at Sudbury into Essex and took in Great Sindon on our way home. It may have been that day that going into Sindon Wood down by the wash to pick up pine-cones for Helen's drawing-room fireplace, I saw the purple agaric growing out of the leaf mould. Certainly, according to Daniel Stewart's book, Cortinarius purpurascens abounds in July and August and this was July. Or it may have been some other day years before when Anne Cambus and I roamed Sindon Wood, or even years after when I went back alone.
I don't like to think that if we had agreed to Vera's request murder might never have been done. It wouldn't be true anyway. Only if we had agreed and our efforts been successful could that particular disaster have been avoided. And we know from subsequent events that our efforts would not have been successful.
Vera wasn't expecting us. We called on her by chance. I was all for driving on, avoiding the lane where Laurel Cottage was, but Andrew said it wouldn't look well if someone in the village saw us and passed it on to Vera. He was always a great stickler for appearances.
Josie Cambus was with her. That may have been the day I first heard mention of Josie's son by her previous marriage, for when we arrived she had been talking of this son and how he was reading law. Vera was as thin as when we last saw her and as aged. But she seemed to have regained her wiry strength. All the time we were there she was on the fidget, her hands constantly picking at the piping on the arms of her chair, and once or twice doing that bearing down business, straining as if pressing on a drill, her face contorted.
About five minutes after we came in, Josie left.
Vera said, ‘Did you come in a car?’ as if it were possible to visit Sindon by any other means in the middle of the afternoon, the lunchtime bus having gone two hours before and the teatime one not due till five.
As if doubting our answer, she went to the window and contemplated the Mercedes, parked up against her fuchsia hedge. She nodded. She was a pathetic sight, was Vera at forty-two – emaciated, gaunt, looking ten years older. Her mouth, though empty, worked like a gum chewer's.